The Company
Shield Security Services (name changed) is a regional security firm based in the East Midlands employing 120 licensed security guards across commercial, retail, and local authority contracts. The company had been trading for eight years and had grown steadily from a founding team of 12 officers.
By 2024, Shield was losing tenders for local authority and NHS contracts almost exclusively because of one question on the Pre-Qualification Questionnaire: “Are you an SIA Approved Contractor?”
The answer was no. And it was costing them contracts.
The Challenge
Shield’s operations director, Rachel, had a clear sense of what stood between them and ACS accreditation. The company ran professionally — guards were vetted, licensed, and trained — but the evidence was scattered across too many places:
- SIA licence copies were stored in individual personnel files — some paper, some scanned to a shared drive
- BS 7858 vetting records were tracked in a spreadsheet maintained by one administrator
- Training records were a mix of paper certificates and emailed confirmations from training providers
- Assignment instructions were Word documents emailed to guards — with no record of receipt or acknowledgement
- Shift scheduling was done in a rota spreadsheet that didn’t link to any of the above
The operations were sound. The paper trail wasn’t. And for ACS, the paper trail is the assessment.
“We knew we were doing the right things,” Rachel said. “We just couldn’t prove it systematically. An assessor asking to see the vetting record for Guard X, deployed at Site Y, on Date Z — we’d be scrambling through three different systems to piece that together.”
The Decision
Shield evaluated three software platforms before choosing TacDesk. The decision came down to two factors: the compliance module specifically built for UK standards, and pricing at £1.50 per guard per month — a fraction of what the enterprise platforms were quoting.
“The others wanted to charge us per user — managers, supervisors, admin staff — and the monthly bill would have been over £2,000 before we’d even started. TacDesk’s per-guard pricing meant we could predict exactly what we’d pay as we grew.”
The Implementation
Shield went live on TacDesk in January and had their ACS assessment scheduled for April — a 12-week window to consolidate three years of compliance evidence into a single auditable system.
Week 1–3: Guard Records Consolidation
The first priority was getting every guard’s compliance record into TacDesk. The platform’s SIA Public Register sync was immediately valuable — rather than manually entering and verifying 120 licence numbers, TacDesk pulled current SIA status automatically.
The first sync surfaced three guards with licences that had expired without the operations team realising. All three were working active shifts. Those guards were stood down and their licences renewed before any client became aware of the issue.
“That alone justified the investment,” Rachel said. “We’d have had a very different conversation with an ACS assessor if they’d spotted that.”
Week 4–6: Vetting Records and Training
BS 7858 vetting completion status was migrated from the spreadsheet into TacDesk’s guard profiles. The platform’s expiry alerting immediately flagged 17 guards whose vetting was approaching the five-year renewal point — something the spreadsheet had never flagged proactively.
Training certificates were uploaded to individual guard records with completion dates and renewal periods. TacDesk automatically calculated upcoming renewal requirements, replacing the administrator’s manual tracking with automated alerts.
Week 7–10: Scheduling Integration and Assignment Instructions
The rota was migrated from spreadsheet to TacDesk’s scheduling module. This was the most significant operational change — managers had to adjust to a new workflow for shift assignment.
The compliance benefit was immediate. When scheduling guards, the system automatically checked SIA licence validity and displayed a warning if any guard’s licence was within 30 days of expiry. Assignment instructions for each site were linked to scheduling, with guards receiving digital confirmation requests before each new site deployment.
Week 11–12: Assessment Preparation
Two weeks before the assessment, Rachel ran through a self-assessment against the ACS criteria using TacDesk’s compliance dashboard. The scoring flags helped identify two remaining gaps: supervisory welfare check records weren’t being consistently logged, and some historical incident reports hadn’t been fully categorised.
Both gaps were resolved before the assessment date — and both would have been invisible without a system that made them visible.
The Assessment
Shield’s ACS assessment took place in April. The assessor spent two days reviewing documentation, interviewing managers, and speaking with guards.
Every document request was answered from TacDesk within minutes:
- Guard deployment history for any site, any date range
- SIA licence status for any guard, with Public Register verification date
- BS 7858 vetting completion and renewal status across the entire workforce
- Assignment instruction acknowledgements for every site deployment in the last 12 months
- Training records with certificates for 120 guards
- Working time compliance reports for the most recent 17-week reference period
- Incident log with categorisation and follow-up actions
“The assessor told me at the end of day one that they’d rarely seen records this well organised for a company of our size,” Rachel said. “They were used to spending half the day waiting while people dug through filing cabinets.”
The Outcome
Shield Security Services passed their initial ACS assessment with zero non-conformities — a clean pass on first assessment. Their ACS score placed them in the top quartile for companies of their size.
Within three months of accreditation:
- Two local authority tenders previously out of reach were submitted and shortlisted
- One NHS facilities management contract was won — a 40-guard deployment that represented a 33% expansion of the workforce
- The company’s ACS score was cited in their winning tender submission as evidence of operational quality
“We’d tried to get ACS two years earlier and abandoned it because we couldn’t get our records in order in time,” Rachel said. “TacDesk was the difference between trying and succeeding.”
Key Metrics
| Implementation time to assessment-ready | 12 weeks |
| Guards on platform | 120 |
| Non-conformities at assessment | 0 |
| Expired licences identified at implementation | 3 |
| Guards flagged for vetting renewal | 17 |
| Monthly platform cost | £180 (£1.50/guard) |
| First new contract won post-accreditation | Within 3 months |
Is Your Company ACS-Ready?
If you’re planning ACS accreditation — or a re-assessment — TacDesk can help you understand where your compliance records stand today.
Book a free demo and we’ll walk through your current setup against the ACS criteria and identify the gaps worth fixing before your assessment date.
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